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Activision has detailed exactly how Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 public matchmaking system works. The publisher explained via following steps are how “Call of Duty: Black Ops 2” filters all matches to players during the matchmaking process.

Check out the complete details below.

Filter all games that can be joined by proximityto the player.
Proximity does not adhere strictly to city, state or country as seen on
a map. Rather, it breaks down into four tiers of geographical region
surrounding the player. The query starts in the tier closest to the
player and expands from there if it cannot find enough matches. The
query also ignores all full or “non-joinable” games, which could be half
or more of the total available games in a playlist.

Filter by broad skill range. This step
takes the proximity-filtered list and narrows it further to the set of
games that fall roughly in the same broad skill range. This is very
loose criteria in Public Match and is a broad-stroke filter that avoids
games at the extreme ends. A player of very high skill should generally not get matched to games where the average skill of players is very low, and vice versa.

Steps 1 and 2 normally take a fraction of a second and result in a
list of “top 50” available games. From here, the game tests for the best connection quality
of those 50 games. Connection quality includes a measure of ping,
bandwidth between you and the host, and NAT compatibility. The game
attempts to join you to the game with the best connection quality of all
possible matches, starting at the top of the list.

Treyarch's David Vonderhaar also confirmed that Black Ops 2 gamers can set their their match search functionality to "Search to Best and play in high-traffic playlists."

This setting will search for fatest match rather than best connection. Here are other reason why Black Ops II players might experience poor connection issue in Black Ops 2.

The first is your local network connection quality which itself
is determined by a number of variables. If the quality of your network
doesn’t meet minimum criteria, the matchmaking won’t matter – the game cannot control variables that are general aspects of internet connectivity.
For steps on improving your local connection quality, see the article
on decreasing lag. Here are some factors that can decrease your quality
of network service:

Low bandwidth to the internet due to ISP bandwidth limits.

High bandwidth usage by other services in your home (video/audio streaming or high-volume concurrent downloads, for example).

Your local home network has restrictive NAT settings.

You are playing the game over a WIFI connection rather than wired Ethernet.

Your ISP is throttling data throughput from your location. Some ISPs erroneously
flag online games as “spam” and will throttle the speed at which data
can transfer in and out of those games. If you experience consistently
laggy games or games that lag during the same time periods every day and
there are no other problems with your home network, check with your ISP
to ensure that they aren’t throttling specific types of data.

The second variable is your region. If you live in a remote region,
it will be more difficult to find hosted games that match your profile.
The best option for those in extremely remote regions is to play during
local peak hours in playlists with high player counts.

The third variable is time of day. Since matchmaking works to find
the game with the best connection quality, it will have a much easier
time finding high quality connections when there are more players online
in your area. As a general rule, peak usage occurs during the late
afternoon and evening hours in each time zone.

One last variable to be aware of is DLC. DLC map packs divide
matchmaking pools into groups of players who have DLC and players who
don’t have DLC. The more map packs that are released, the more
matchmaking pools there are. Nine months after the initial launch of the
game, for example, the highest single population of players is that
which owns all map packs.